Booksellers versus Bestsellers

For much of human history, we have been ruled by faith and force. It's easy to understand why force -- the king with his troops -- can rule, but why is faith so important?

Faith is about how we should live. And one of the functions of those who are in charge of faith is to decide who is virtuous, and what actions are virtuous. That is a powerful thing: It means those who interpret virtue can say who is acting rightly, and who is not.

We like to believe we live in a just world, in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. In a way, the arbiters of what is virtuous are there to reassure us that the world is unfolding as it should. But they are also meant to be a check on those who cheat.

It is therefore in the interest of those who succeed to influence the perception of virtue so that their gains are not regarded as ill-gotten. Kings would rather you believe they ruled by divine right -- the will of God -- than that they simply control a lot of soldiers. The rich of the Gilded Age liked to believe they were the product of social Darwinism, that their wealth was a sign that they were fitter than the poor, just as our modern-day rich like Objectivism, Ayn Rand's reboot of social Darwinism without the bogus biology.

Rand is an interesting case in the study of virtue. She did, after all, write the book on The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand admired the psychopathic killer Edward Wayne Hickman, because of his selfishness and unwillingness to be bound by social conventions such as not killing people.

In reality, Rand's notions about morality make no sense in terms of the way people live their lives. Most parents would sacrifice a great deal for the sake of their children, a characteristic that is hardly unique to humans.

Rand's is a philosophy compatible with narcissism and psychopathy, and has no room for idealism, patriotism, or noble self-sacrifice of any sort. It does, however, fit perfectly with the age of the corporation as it now exists.

There was a time when corporations were managed as if they were a person, with shareholders, bondholders, customers and employees all considered as stakeholders. The switch to managing for shareholder value, which started in the 1970s, has remade corporations into a different kind of organization, closer to the Ayn Rand ideal of the selfish individual. And this new version of the right actions for a corporation appear to have seeped into the rest of the culture, with some surprising groups adopting its justifications and notions of what are right actions.

The rise of a libertarian right has given us an entire political movement built around this rather strange notion of virtue. This movement is the strange bedfellow of Christian conservatives who believe Christ dying for their sins is the essence of morality and paleoconservatives who believe in patriotism and the nobility of going to war and becoming a hero.

Our political divisions are as much moral as anything else, but there are deeper and darker emotions at work. To some extent, the morality of libertarians, Christian conservatives, and paleoconservatives are a sham and a justification for things less obviously related to virtue.

When Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 run for the presidency on the Republican ticket, opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, he did something a large part of the country wanted, regardless of how it was justified: He took a stand against civil rights. Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the States Rights Democratic Party ticket, preaching segregation and taking 39 electoral college votes, became a Republican.

Richard Nixon, sometimes called "the last liberal" for his actual policies, pursued a Southern strategy for election, and continued a transition that made the Republican Party the party of the South.

Now, it's easy to see how paleoconservatives would be attracted to a party that opposed the Civil Rights Act (many northern Republicans had voted for it, but having Goldwater at the top of the ticket opposing it changed how the party was perceived.) But why would Christian Conservatives be attracted to such a party?

Well, one thing that happened after the Civil Rights Act passed was integration of public schools. And white parents who didn't want their kids in schools with blacks started sending them to a new crop of private schools, colloquially known as "white academies." And many of those were associated with white Evangelical churches. When the nonprofit status of those schools was threatened by a crackdown on those that existed entirely to segregate, those churches became interested in politics, and in limited government.

The libertarian/small government justification for fighting federal efforts to desegregate and put an end to Jim Crow was also attractive to rich people who wanted to pay lower taxes. It was easy enough to demonize government spending if such spending was thought to help Those People, and another group fastened onto the libertarian justification machine like remora on a shark.

Because this is what happens when virtue bestows power. You have to put forward a moral justification for your political movement, and "government is the problem, not the solution" sounded so much better than the 19th century justifications that were no longer acceptable.

This is a mask of virtue on the face of an ancient evil, an effort to make a carnival of matters of conscience. But in the end, can they war successfully against a principle of politics? Can the notion that some people aren't worth as much as others because of some feature they cannot control, such as the color of their skin, triumph over the principle that "all men are created equal"?

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

A friend from New South Wales asks, if Europe can't resolve the debt crisis on its periphery by means of the sort of fiscal union that would have a central authority bail out banks, why can the U.S. do so?

I've been following the Grexit controversy (potential Greek exit from the Euro zone) with interest, since it has the potential to disrupt one of the great internationalist projects of the last century, the European Union. I think I have the answer to my friend's question.

First, Americans identified with each other culturally much more than Europeans do. Second, we've had real fiscal union since 1790, thanks to the genius of Alexander Hamilton.

After the Revolutionary War, the original 13 colonies had quite a lot of debt, much of it owed to foreign banks and investors (primarily in the Netherlands.) Many were in a poor position to pay back the loans, and there was talk of default.

Hamilton pushed through the Sinking Fund Act of 1790, which was somewhat misnamed for political reasons. It didn't really pay down the debt so much as fund it, so it could be turned over periodically and become the basis for a market in securities that would help provide the financing to develop industry in the new nation.

But equally important was its political role. Hamilton saw that if the federal government took over the war debts and financed them through taxes, the states would be dependent on the federal government and the federal taxing authority to pay off their debts. This cemented the nation into one political and financial unit.

Not that this happened without difficulties or entirely peacefully. George Washington led a militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794,) an insurrection against federal taxes on corn whiskey. This happened while George Washington was president, and he became the only sitting president to lead troops in the field while suppressing it.

Jared Bernstein writes that a German economist asked him, "How do you think the people of Manhattan would like bailing out Texas?" And Paul Krugman points out that it did, big time, during the Savings and Loan crisis.

As it happens, I was there, as the business reporter for the Odessa American, a daily in West Texas. Bankers were getting convicted of crimes and sentenced to brief incarceration at hard summer camp in low-security prisons, the Resolution Trust Corporation was shutting down S&Ls and the federal government was guaranteeing the deposits, and we never heard a peep out of those parts of the country that contributed money to resolve the situation.

Krugman points out that the resolution of this crisis cost about $125 million "back when that was real money," and about $75 million went to Texas. It didn't go in the form of loans, it went in the form of outright transfers from areas like Manhattan that weren't having a banking crisis.

If the powers that be in Europe wanted a United States of Europe, they would act as Hamilton and Washington did to make sure the debts of the weaker states got paid off by a central authority. But they didn't, and they can't, because Europe is not about to become a United States of Europe. German voters won't stand for bailing out Greece, there is no central taxing authority and is not likely to be one, and a central European authority invading an area that rebelled against a centralized taxing authority is unthinkable.

All of which is why the Euro was a bad idea to start with. There are those in Europe who think that forcing Greece to exit the Euro will make the rest of the Euro area stronger, but actually, it demonstrates why the Euro can't work, and why the project to make a United States of Europe is a doomed enterprise.

America works as a currency area, in part, because large and ongoing transfers of wealth happen between productive states like Massachusetts and New York on the one hand, and low productivity states like Mississippi and Arkansas on the other.

Those wealth transfers go on year after year, in the form of welfare spending, federal unemployment insurance, social security, disability benefits, and other programs. Most of this is so invisible to recipients that they vote for people who want to cut the federal budget.

It's taken a long time for us to evolve our financial system, and there have been some pretty rough patches along the way. Andrew Jackson, one of our worst presidents, refused to renew the charter for the Bank of the United States, leaving the country without a central bank from 1836 to 1913. Between the end of bank's charter and the beginning of the Civil War, state banks were issuing currency, and how much it was worth depended, among other things, on how close you were to the issuing bank. Repeated financial crises between the 1870s and 1913 convinced the powers that be that we needed a central bank. We didn't get centralized deposit insurance until the bank failures of the 1930s demonstrated how badly that was needed.

But at least we had the basic ingredients for a proper currency union, even when we didn't have a workable currency system thanks to Old Hickory. And the basic principle that we were a nation was settled between 1790 and 1794, with the Sinking Fund Act and the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion.

Europe is currently demonstrating that they do not have the unity the Sinking Fund Act of 1790 represented. Any attempt to set up such a mechanism would probably produce the European equivalent of the Whiskey Rebellion, and there is zero chance that Europe would put up with the military suppression of such a reaction.

Try to imagine German troops marching into Belgium to suppress a tax revolt. It would be déjà vu, and not in a good way. I feel confident that the German people would stand with the Belgians against such an action..

Perhaps there was a gentler path to a fiscal union, one in which the burden was shared without a central authority. For example, the banks that owned most of the Greek debt were Greek, German, French, and Italian. Each country could have bailed out its own banks. Instead, the troika (the European Central Bank, European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) chose to paper over the issue, pretending that Greece suffered not from insolvency but from a liquidity problem. Some private lenders took a bit of a haircut, then the private debt got converted into ECB and IMF debt. In the end, Greece is on the hook to pay back all the debt, rather than having defaulted, as logic said they should, and having each country bail out its own banks.

We know that Angela Merkel has been saying privately since at least 2011 that the Greek debt was unsustainable, that they would, in the end, default. And yet the policy of the German government was and still is that Greece must pay back every penny with interest. This means that the German government has been pursuing a policy that they knew wouldn't work, so there must be some sort of hidden agenda served by this hypocrisy.

That agenda could be as simple as an unwillingness to face German voters with inconvenient and unpopular truths. The longer Merkel continues to fail to tell the German people the truth, that the Greek crisis will not be resolved by making them pay back every penny, the harder it becomes for her to tell them.

Or it could be that there is some other goal. Yanis Varoufakis, who until recently was the Greek finance minister in charge of negotiating a resolution to the crisis, recently wrote an op-ed piece in The Guardian claiming that Germany wants to scare the bejesus out of France.

"Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone," he wrote.

No doubt there is more than one reason for the policy of the German and other governments on the Greek debt crisis. Whatever the reasons are, they seem impervious to evidence. Had the initial bailout worked as the troika said it would, the crisis would be over. Here's a chart from Paul Krugman's blog showing the difference between the IMF's economic projections for Greece and what actually happened:

It's pretty obvious that if the Greek economy were the size the IMF said it would be at this point, they would have far less trouble paying back the debt. But after five years of failure, the troika offers nothing but more of the same policies.

These policies have resulted in the Greek economy shrinking more quickly than the debt is paid back. More of the same can be expected to have more of the same result, which means that the Greek ability to pay back the debt is undermined to the extent that the whole exercise is futile. It also means that since the denominator in the debt/GDP ratio is sinking, a Greek government that started with a debt of 100% of GDP now has a debt of about 170% of GDP, despite paying back billions of dollars.

It's not like the Germans should be unfamiliar with how this works. Debt forgiveness and the Marshall Plan following World War II rebuilt the German economy.

This is covered in a paper by London School of Economics Professor of Economic History Albrecht Ritschl

http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/researchImpact/PDFs/germany-hypocrisy-eurozone-debt-crisis.pdf"In a telling comparison Ritschl showed that the debts racked up by the struggling Eurozone economies - Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain - were equal in size to Germany's current gross domestic product. In other words, debt cancellation for the Eurozone would be equivalent to the debts that were cancelled by the Allies after World War II. "In addition, the Marshall Plan injected $17 billion -- equivalent to roughly $160 billion in today's money -- to rebuild the country we had spend so much money reducing to rubble.

The debt cancellation, by the way, was supposed to be temporary -- only until Germany was unified. But Germany was unified in 1990, and Germany has still not been required to repay the debt.

Having itself relied upon the kindness of foreigners, Germany seems disinclined to pay it forward, and make no mistake, Germany is the driving force in negotiation over the Greek debt.

I can only think that Germany is disenchanted with the European project, and has no wish for a stronger union. It seems they wish to make Greece an example, but what will Greece be an example of?

I think they will be an example of the fact that Europe, despite all the years of the European Union, does not wish to be a true union. Grexit is the beginning of a great unraveling of the dreams of the European elites.

I propose a plywood catboat for public sail, and I think it would be easy enough to sail for CWB to use in our sailing instruction program and even the sailboat livery.

The boat would be laid out like a Woods Hole boat, with a large cockpit surrounded by a tall coaming only inches inside the deck.

It would have a deep, narrow centerboard, more efficient than the old fashioned pie-slice shaped boards. It would have a short, steep skeg instead of the traditional long skeg so that it would be more maneuverable than most catboats.

The boat would be about 21 feet long and about ten feet wide. It would have plenty of initial stability, which should enable it to get a good rating for carrying capacity from the Coast Guard.

It would carry the traditional catboat rig, with a low center of effort. I figure it should be fine with about 300 square feet of sail and about 500 lb. of ballast so the boat doesn't get squirrely when sailed light.

The plan is to build it in stitch and glue with 3/8 inch plywood, glassed for abrasion protection. The boat will probably weigh about 1,000 lb. without the ballast, and it's designed for a displacement of 2,900 lb., so with the weight of the boat and the ballast at 1.500 lb., that leaves about 1,400 lb. for payload. That's about eight people, or one crew and seven passengers.

The panels develop very well, and all are well under 24 ft. long and less than 4 ft. wide, which fits well with the dimensions of the plywood. There's actually less stress in the panel with the catboat bow than in the bilge panel.

I believe such a boat would offer low first cost, low maintenance costs, usefulness in at least three of the Center's programs, and deliver a good experience to those who sail it.

The boat is stitch and glue, with two panels a side, and I've managed to get the panels to develop with fairly low stress. In fact, there's less stress in the panel that forms the bottom and the catboat bow than there is in the side panels. Still, you'd best build with 4 mm okume plywood, which is light, fairly flexible, and comes from sustainable plantations. One problem is that the boat is too wide to fit into my 1997 Nissan's bed, so I'd have to cartop it. All-up weight is going to be around 100 lb., and you only have to lift one end at a time, so that shouldn't be too bad. Cost of construction with the sail should be less than $1,000.

Now, I just need free time (I work six days a week), a space to build it, and a bit of cash to make the thing...well, they say man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a metaphor?

Update: On the advice of Tom Price, I've raised the freeboard, and I think that makes the boat better:

My good friend John McCartney had an elderly cat who could eat only the softest of soft cat food, and didn't finish what he was served, so John would put the rest outside to be eaten by crows.

The crows were appreciative. John would put the bowl out, light a cigarette, and contemplate the crows at their dinner, a very soothing activity.

Then, the cat died. He achieved great age for a cat, and had a good life, so it was a fond farewell. It was the crows who really suffered, because there were no longer cat food leftovers to feed them. But crows adapt and survive, and they found food.

But they never forgot John's kindness to them, and still tended to hang around when he went out for a smoke.

One day, a crow walked up to him holding a worm in its mouth, and dropped it at his feet.

But I prefer a more anthropomorphic explanation. I prefer to think the crow was, in effect, saying:

"You know, we remember how generous you were to us when you had lots of food. We realize that you've fallen on hard times and no longer have dishes of extra meat to share, and well, me and the flock, we had a bit of a whip-'round, and, well, long story short -- here's a worm."

It's a bit like the story of the ravens feeding the prophet Elijah.1 Kings, 17:6And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook.But was it the flesh of worms?

I've been thinking about what would be needed to make sailing more popular, and I think one problem is the perception of it being expensive. What we need is a design that can be built for less than $1,500 including the rig with a professionally made sail.

It should have good performance, or at least the feel of good performance. It should be self-draining in case of a capsize. And it should have a big, friendly cockpit for when people want to sail with friends.

My approach would be to design it around the Laser practice sail, which costs around $150, about a third of what a sail this size normally costs. The boat would be stitch and glue, so it could be built quickly with a minimum of tools and skill. The panels should require no more than one scarf, which means the boat will be around 15 ft. I'd give it a full-length cockpit with a deck sloped to encourage water to leave through the stern.

Here's what I'm got so far:

With semi-skilled volunteer labor and somebody's garage, it should be possible to build four or five of these for the price of a new Laser. They wouldn't be quite as fast as a Laser, but they'd be as fast as each other.

I've rethought the rudder since I made the first illustration, substituting a lower-aspect version with more area, so that it will really crank the stern around when put over with authority. Built in 1/4 inch plywood, the boat should be able to carry four pre-teens, three slender teens, a trim couple, or one big galoot. The idea is a boat that could be built for about 1,200 in materials, including a professionally made sail, so that a yacht club, scout troop, or non-profit, could build about four boats for the cost of one new Laser. It won't be quite as fact as the Laser, but should keep the crew drier and allow for a more social sailing experience.

Police have got to lose their feeling that they can hurt people with impunity, and the way to do that is to change how they are paid.

Any time armed men think they can break the law with impunity, they are a threat to civilization. It's my belief that a small number of police are resulting in huge settlements for their employers, and police departments are remarkably inept at rooting them out.

The city of Chicago has agreed to pay out $5.5 million because a group of police allegedly routinely tortured prisoners -- mainly poor black ones -- in the 1970s and '80s. The city of Baltimore has paid out even more over the last few years for police brutality settlements. We need to give police incentives that will change their behavior.

The police unions do their best to make sure the officers involved in most cases of police brutality, even those that prove expensive for the cities that employ them, are not fired. Police officers often try to cover up the behavior of their fellow cops.

We need to change the incentives. The Chicago police department's alleged torture happened between 1972 and 1991. It could not happen for nearly two decades without the knowledge police outside of the "midnight crew" said to have done this.

Now a prosecutor who works closely with the police must decide whether one of the cops committed a crime in shooting Rice, and whether the other committed a crime covering for him. The prosecutor has got to feel conflicted.

On the whole, things are stacked in favor of the cops in these events, which is why the midnight crew got away with torture for nearly two decades. The ubiquity of cell phone videos has revealed much about how police behave that we would not have known in the past. What should we do about it?

Punishment is one option, and when police commit crimes, they should be subject to the law like anyone else. But until we can make real changes in police culture, we're not going to fix the problem.

I suggest an incentive system that would change the way police behave. Establish a compensation fund, and what doesn't get paid out in settlements for police brutality can be released as a stipend to police. Anyone whose behavior causes a settlement or who covers up behavior that causes a settlement loses the stipend. The amount of everyone's stipend is reduced when the fund is run down by a settlement.

I think cops know who the bad apples are. There are social pressures to cover for them, an us-against-them attitude to all non-police, in most departments. Police unions have no incentive to try to weed them out, because they have no skin in the game when it comes to settlements. Their members misbehave, someone else pays. In the future, police contracts need to give the cops and their union some skin in the game.

Once, I interviewed a Native man who had been a bonded deputy of Island County. He put up a bond, I don't recall how large, and he'd lose it if he did something that resulted in the county having to pay out because of his behavior. I don't know what happened to this custom, but it seems to me that it was a good one.

One consequence of the ubiquity of video is that more cases are going to go against the police, and cities are going to have to pay out more money. It is quite reasonable to make police pay depend, in part, on whether they break the law and on whether they behave in ways that are expensive for their employers.

President Obama being sworn in using Lincoln's Bible.I was thinking about that in terms of some apparently intelligent people I've run into who insist that President Barack Obama is a Muslim. What purpose does it serve to advertise such an absurd notion?

The answer is that like many myths, it serves to define the person who holds the belief as part of a group, and defines people who don't hold it as not part of the group. In addition, it defines President Obama as the Other, one who can never be part of the group.

An interesting aspect of myths is that they do not need to be objectively true. The information they carry is not about objective truth. It is more likely to be about values, identity, belonging, and desires.

Racism is no longer socially acceptable through most of our society, so saying you object to President Obama because he is black is not acceptable speech. Calling him a Muslim defines him as the Other without using racial rhetoric. In politics, this is known as a 'dog whistle,' a mode of speech that will be understood by its intended audience to say something the rest of society condemns, and not be understood in the same way by society at large.

But I don't think the people who profess this belief are necessarily insincere, though surely some are. Perhaps it is better to understand this in terms of what Harry G. Frankfurt was talking about in his brief book, On Bullshit. The problem he addresses is that of the person who "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

But in a sense, this is what myth has always done. In terms of maintaining a distinct society, the question is not whether the dietary rules in Leviticus or the Ten Commandments came from God, what matters is that you get people to adopt the beliefs and behaviors that define the group. Like bullshit, the question of truth does not arise with myth.

J.R.R. Tolkien claimed that there are things only myths can teach us, things reason cannot convey. But while reason may not be able to convey a sense of belonging to the group and excluding others from it, reason can at least understand what myth is conveying.

One interesting aspect of this is that we sometimes don't recognize a myth as such. For example, those both inside the group and outside the group that claim President Obama is a Muslim claim the 'debate' is about truth, when in fact those within the group claiming he is a Muslim are not persuadable by any proof.

This leads to a discussion that is not about the real meaning of the myth. Treating a myth as if it were part of a rational debate is a bit like treating a dog whistle as music. The point is not how it sounds, the point is who can hear it.

In some ways, the truth we know alone is less powerful than the lies we believe together. Shared beliefs are a form of identity, and can motivate the desired social action without being true. Consider The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document purported to describe a Jewish plan to take over the world by subverting the morals of gentiles, taking over the banking system in order to control the world economy, taking over the press, and bringing down civilization. You can still hear the echos of this in the paranoid rantings of the extreme right.

No matter that it had nothing to do with actual Jewish activities, it motivated people to act toward 'those people' as the authors intended. It appears to have first been published in Russia in 1902, and by 1905 it had been proved to be a hoax.

But it served its purpose. Those who appear to have manufactured the hoax were also involved in inciting the Russian pogroms of 1903-1906, which cost thousands of Jews their lives and caused many more to flee Russia.

The exposure of the hoax did not prevent it from spreading. Henry Ford paid for the publication of 500,000 copies in English in 1920. By 1921, The Times of London had exposed the hoax for readers of the English edition, but it was not until 1927 that Ford apologized for this and other anti-Semitic publications. The first translation by a Muslim Arab came in 1951, three years after the foundation of Israel.

The anti-Semitic agenda was about tribalism expressed as religion, about controlling "those people," anyone who did not belong to the dominant group. There was no rational basis for pogroms or for antisemitism at all. This was not an issue of reason, it was an issue of emotion, of paranoia about those who are not part of the ruling group.

One way to become a leader is to organize the march, then position yourself at the front of it. Those who manufactured The Protocols were not just expressing their hatred, they were also using that hatred to achieve prominence.

And the themes of The Protocols are still in use. A quick online search reveals that a wide variety of conservative yakkers are pushing the idea that President Obama is trying to destroy America, or capitalism, or Israel. If they can make people afraid, they can motivate action, and be seen as leaders.

Fear is a great emotion for overcoming the restraints of reason. One reason it has not worked terribly well against our rather quiet, cerebral president is that nothing about him seems ominous, and he's good at getting people to stop and think.

The mast has to be farther forward to make the rig balance with the short hull, so if the boat has a foredeck the mast will step through it. I'm thinking the boat can be built lighter by omitting the air tanks and relying on flotation bags.

Although the new Meerkat is a foot longer, it's still designed to fit in the back of my little Nissan pickup truck, so it's only 4 feet wide.

I might also switch to a daggerboard to save weight, although I must say, the combination of a barn-door rudder on a skeg and a centerboard is quite nice for working off a beach.

The boat still has a flat bottom and slack bilges, based on the same faceted midsection I used on the original, but the run is straighter and the deflection angle of the bilge panels is less, so this one could be prompted to plane with a light crew and a good wind.

I think this design would be better for the novice sailor, relying more on initial stability than on crew reactions as in the original.